TRANSCEND with Cylvia Hayes

TRANSCEND with Cylvia Hayes

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TRANSCEND with Cylvia Hayes
TRANSCEND with Cylvia Hayes
20-Year Learning Curve

20-Year Learning Curve

This Oldish Dog Learned a New Trick

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Cylvia Hayes
Aug 28, 2024
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TRANSCEND with Cylvia Hayes
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20-Year Learning Curve
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Took 20 years but the shade cloth is great!

I moved into my current home in the summer of 2004. Every year since, as soon as the weather warms, my back deck becomes my office. Over and over throughout the day, as the sun shifts overhead, I scoot the table and chairs around trying to keep myself and the laptop in shade. Certain times of the day there is very little shade to be had.  

I was grappling with this a week ago and it occurred to me that I could hang a shade cloth on the open rafters of the deck. I stretched one of my old sarongs across the two-by-fours and, voila! Shade and gentler filtered sunshine.

For Pete’s sake, why hadn’t I done this twenty years ago?! I found the event both humbling and humorous. On the one hand I consider myself pretty smart and resourceful but then again it took twenty years to hatch an idea for making more shade on my deck. Now I find myself observing how I’m going about many everyday activities and questioning whether I’m doing them the way I am because it’s the best way or just because it’s how I’ve always done it.

The somewhat silly experience on the mundane plane gave me an unexpected little jolt of hope. If a 50-something, somewhat set-in-her-ways woman can have a flash of inspiration and change up decades-old behavior then perhaps humanity collectively can suddenly be inspired to find new and better ways of interacting with one another and our planet.

Along those lines I wanted to share a pretty extraordinary essay that was published on the Substack called A Beautiful Resistance. The writer, Charles Liburd, explains Donald Trump as an inevitable product of “narcissistic capitalism.” I hadn’t heard the term narcissistic capitalism before but it is so very spot on I wish I had come up with it. It’s a perfect description for the current economic system based on excessive consumption, destruction of the sacred, and glaring inequity between “haves” and “have nots”. Below are a few of my favorite passages:

Trump's narcissism (and long may it last) demands that everything is seen. It must have an audience, it exists to be witnessed and lauded. The fact that there is a disconnect between what he believes to be true and what we are seeing, does not concern him. No, more than that…it is a concern he believes does not exist.

And it [is] here, in the small crevice of that disconnection, that Trump meets capitalism, that in turn meets the most fabulous revolutionary opportunity of our time that will be exposed and exploited by humanity and it is, by the force of capitalist narcissism, unstoppable.

A narcissistic economic system will inevitably throw up a narcissistic prophet who will come at the end of its days to usher in the new. That prophet must reflect the fundamentals of the system he represents in a way that is visceral, visual and profound: so that everyone can see it, feel it, hear it; and in so doing come to understand that the end is nigh. Trump is that visual. Trump is the beginning of that end.

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